Website Scores Local Hospitals for Safety

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An interactive website is taking a data-driven approach to tell patients about hospital dangers.

Updated at 5:49 AM CST on Wednesday, Oct 23, 2013

An interactive website is taking a data-driven approach to tell patients about hospital dangers.

The Leapfrog Group has designed a Hospital Safety Score, which ranks hospitals on a standard letter grading system (A-D,F) based on how safe patients are when staying at that hospital.

The group uses data including whether a foreign object was retained inside a patient after surgery, accidental puncture or laceration, falls and trauma, hand hygiene and death among surgical inpatients, as some of the 28 measures of data collected by the group's hospital survey, the Center for Disease Control, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

That data is giving many hospitals in the area good marks, with medical facilities in Irving, Plano, Denton, Arlington and others all receiving "A" grades.

Some hospitals didn't fare as well. Dallas Medical Center, formerly known as the Texas Hospital for Advanced Medicine, scored on "D" according to the group. Texas Regional Medical Center in Sunnyvale also scored a "D."

The group said 440,000 Americans die each year from preventable hospital errors.